Western-Star.com

SYRACUSE, Ind. — With his first feature film's acceptance into the Cannes Film Festival, perhaps the world's premiere event of its kind, Miami University graduate Jimmy Conroy II is already looking ahead to the Oscars.

"I think it's an Academy Award contender," he said. "It's a high quality documentary that is probably the last word in telling the story of two remarkable film careers."

Conroy served as executive producer of "No Subtitles Necessary: The Story of Laszlo and Vilmos." It will be screened May 22 in a part of the festival called "Cannes Classics," which focuses on restored or rediscovered masterworks and documentaries about cinema.

Featuring interviews with Barbra Streisand, Sharon Stone, Jon Voight and Martin Scorsese, the film tells the story of two of Hollywood's most influential directors of photography, Laszlo Kovacs and Vilmos Zsigmond.

As film students in Hungary, Kovacs and Zsigmond shot footage of the Russian invasion of Budapest and subsequently smuggled it out of the country. Barely escaping with their lives, they fled to America and settled in Hollywood, eventually saving enough money to buy their own 16mm camera to begin shooting movies.

Both rose to prominence in the 1960s and '70s, having shot films such as "Easy Rider," "Five Easy Pieces," "McCabe and Mrs. Miller," "Deliverance," "Paper Moon" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

Because of its insider-focus, the film has attracted a lot of attention from Hollywood, even though it was made outside the Hollywood system.

"The current cost of Hollywood production is insane," said Conroy, a 1999 Miami grad who is now a venture capitalist based in northern Indiana. "We understand Midwestern values and Midwestern manufacturing techniques, so we feel we can produce films much more inexpensively than they do in Hollywood."

Conroy said that other business ventures — along with a desire to be frugal — prevents him from going to France for the screening.

"It's probably a decision I'll look back upon and regret," he said. "But right now (not going is) the responsible thing to do."

Contact this reporter at (513) 820-2188 or rjones@coxohio.com.

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